Perception of when old age starts has increased over time, shows study
sylver_dragon @ sylver_dragon @lemmy.world Posts 4Comments 966Joined 2 yr. ago
sylver_dragon @ sylver_dragon @lemmy.world
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Can I? Yes, I grew up before YouTube and got to see both the growth of the public internet and YouTube. So, I know how to get along without it.
Would I want to? Not really. YouTube is like many things which have come about in human history, it's got it's good parts and it's bad parts. But, on the balance, I think the good outweighs the bad. The important bit is finding that balance where you get more good out of it than bad.
One of the great and terrible things about YouTube is the low barrier to entry. It's very easy for someone with a passion in a niche area to start posting videos. This means that we can get hundreds of hours of videos showing people removing hornet nests. Or, any other random thing I would have never seen in a world of serial TV. You can also get videos showing you how to do almost anything. Granted, those videos can be outright wrong, dangerous or just really bad. But, you may also be able to discover and start a hobby you would have never known about. YouTube has democratized video sharing in a way which didn't exist before it. And I suspect that, were YouTube to disappear tomorrow, something would pop up in it's place to replace it. People want easy video sharing. People want to be able to find copious amounts of weird and strange things. Sure, if you dig too far into the darker corners, you are going to find something you find objectionable. But, that's always a problem with large groups of people, there's always a few rotten apples which need removing.
So overall, I'm pretty positive on YouTube. Yup, it has problems and those need to be worked on. However, I'm far happier to have a place where video sharing is highly democratized, which has problems with that ease of sharing being abused; than I would be without it. The free flow of information necessarily means that objectionable things will be able to flow as well. That sucks, but it's much better than the alternative.
He just wants a bit more Living Space.
And good riddance to bad rubbish. I don't want a game which is designed to milk me for every dollar I am worth and then get shut down when the developer no longer sees enough money left on the table. Give me a solid game which I can replay without having to worry about about some server going tits up and I'll happily pay you. I'll even buy DLC if the game is good enough. But, I'm not subscribing to some piece of shit skinner box which doesn't respect my time.
Probably worth noting that the Gregorian Calendar was an invention of the 16th Century. It was invented to deal with the problems of the Julian Calendar and the creators would have had a firm understanding of the concept of zero. The AD/BC split was all about the assumed year of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth (according to Christian mythology). The year of his birth was set as the first year Anno Domini or "The year of the Lord". Or the first year where Jesus was kicking about. The year prior to that would therefore be the first year before "Before Christ" was alive, and therefore the year 1 BC.
Yo ho, yo ho off to the digital seas we go!
In fairness, I can see a use case for this as something to have on in the background while doing other tasks or as a way to discover new content either the algorithms would have never shown you or you might not have clicked on. But, I can also see the service providers using this to further try to show-horn ads into everything and fuck up the current system of "pick a show I want to watch and watch it now". In which case, it's once again time for them to learn that piracy isn't so much a price problem as a service one.
While certainly an interesting development, this is just in a petri dish.
I'm glad I haven't been reading much about the show online. I just finished episode 4 last night and I'm really loving the show. They absolutely nailed the visuals and general vibe of the world. I'll admit to be being skeptical about the show in Amazon's hands. The Rings of Power and first season of Wheel of Time were just poorly written. Though, I did feel that the second season of WoT picked up a bit. So, maybe the folks at Amazon are learning. My only remaining concern for Fallout is how subsequent seasons go. They have hyped the involvement of Johnathan Nolan who was behind Westworld on HBO. Westworld season 1 was downright awesome. But, the rest of the show felt like they were so busy trying to re-capture that magic that they forgot to tell a good story. Fortunately, Nolan is directing and producing Fallout and not writing it. So maybe it won't get written into a corner where there really isn't any more story to tell and several more seasons ordered.
Can't wait to see what they have done. The attention to detail in Kingdom Come: Deliverance was fantastic.
Experience Fallout 4 on your next-generation PC with widescreen and ultra-widescreen support
So, they are finally catching up with the mods. Better late than never, I guess.
Early Blizzard games actually leaned into this. I remember the original Diablo allowed you to install a "spawn" version of the game. Basically, a copy of the game which was locked into playing in a LAN game. My group spent so many hours in that game, Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear and others. We'd all drag our systems to one person's home, setup and spend a long weekend just playing. Taking a massive CRT monitor to someone's home was always a PITA, but goddam it was worth it.
As others have stated, the existence of extra-terrestrial life seems a near certainty. We know that intelligent life can evolve in the universe (QED: we exist) and given the vastness of the observable universe it seems highly probable that it's happened more than once. Limiting ourselves to just the Milky Way galaxy, again given the size and number of stars, it seems reasonably likely that there is other intelligent life here.
Have they been to Earth? This one strikes me as less likely. The universe is big, just mind bogglingly big. Even an infinitesimally small part of it, like the Milky Way galaxy is still insanely big. And as best as our current understanding of physics provides, we cannot exceed the speed of light. And even trying to approach that speed is fraught with all kinds of problems. At any significant fraction of the speed of light, bumping into tiny bits of space dust can cause real problems for spaceships (think: nuclear weapon level energies released). Even sub-atomic particles cause problems, as they will be the same as high energy radiation at those speeds. Even if those issues can be handled, there is the problem of reaction mass to get ships up to and decelerate from those speeds. Even electric ion engines need some sort of reaction mass to push against, and that has to be carried. This then runs us face first into the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation. For every extra bit of reaction mass you carry, you need even more reaction mass to get everything up to speed. Eventually, you're trying to carry so much mass that the whole thing just gets unfeasible. As a related tanget this XKCD What-If gets into a lot of the same issues.
So ya, I doubt that ET has been to Earth, simply because crossing the gulf of intergalactic space would require an investment of resources which is so insanely big that no sane species would bother. And then there is the whole issue of time. Sure, at a sufficient speed and thanks to Lorentz Contraction you can actually cross the Milky Way galaxy in a reasonable amount of time, in your own frame of reference. IIRC, it's something like a single year assuming 1g acceleration half way there and a similar deceleration after the half-way point (can't be arsed to look it up. You, dear reader, have fun with that). However, to the observer sitting on Earth, it takes much, much longer. So long that the folks sending you off will be dead, decayed, fossilized and those fossils long degraded by the time you get there. When you get back, your home planet may well not exist anymore and and thing resembling your home society will have long been lost to the sands of time. Again, no sane species is going to make such an investment of resources for what is effectively no return.
But wait, what if aliens have some magic technology which lets them bypass the limitations on the speed of light? Ok well, if little green Gandalf can cast a teleport spell on Frodo the tentacled alien, then yes he can toss his thing in whatever crack he wants. But, absent any evidence to show that such magic is possible, then it's not really worth consideration.
So, does "the government" have some secret knowledge about aliens? I highly doubt it. Mostly, because I doubt such exists. But, also consider the difficulty of maintaining such a secret for decades with possibly thousands of people knowing. One of the things you learn about, when you get a US FedGov Clearance, is the concept of "Need to Know". One of the things the US Government learned during the Vietnam War was the fact that the more people who know a secret, the more likely it is to leak. If you have a ton of time and insomnia, I highly recommend reading up on Purple Dragon. Secrets leak, all the time. Yet somehow there has been a massive conspiracy around aliens visiting Earth. Oh and that conspiracy would need to extend beyond just the US Government to include other, hostile, governments. But, the only evidence we have is blury videos and crackpots. Ya, bullshit.
So ya, ET is likely "out there", the math makes it pretty likely. At the same time, physics makes it really, really, really hard for him to get here. And no international conspiracy would be able to hide such events over decades.
Not mentioned in this article, but in one they linked about the sale of Saber Interactive:
Beacon co-founder Matthew Karch...noting that he will "continue to remain a large, long-term shareholder of Embracer."
He's just protecting his investment by polishing a turd.
Yes, for a completely unrelated reason. There have been filling deadlines for candidates at basically every level of government for a very long time and those have never been successfully challenged in court. And even with the most liberal Judges on the SCOTUS likely wouldn't bat an eye at them. The problem here isn't Alabama (for once) it's the DNC being so high on it's own shit that they assumed the laws wouldn't be applied to them. Sure, the State Legislature could pass a law temporarily waiving that requirement. It seems awful stupid to bet on it when the convention could happen a week earlier and avoid the whole thing.
I was thinking that, too, but prior to the Sun becoming a white dwarf, the Sun is predicted to expand and swallow Earth (and Venus and Mercury), so the Sun’s mass will increase.
A quick look has the mass of Mercury, Venus and Earth at close to 2 times the mass of Earth by itself. The Sun is around 330,000 times the mass of Earth. Soaking up all the inner planets means a change of less than 1/10th of 1% to the mass of the Sun. It's not going to have an appreciable effect on it's gravitational pull. The Sun already holds the vast majority of the mass of the solar system. With Jupiter holding most of the rest.
Contrary to the headline, I suspect the only way the solar system will be destroyed by a white dwarf will be if one ends up whipping through our solar system. That would make for a very bad day.
After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”
--Genesis 22:1-2
Ya, Yahweh is a bit of a dick.
I think one of the reasons "evil" plot lines get written into games is largely because players keep asking for them. I also think most developers set out to write a game with a heroic plot line. But, because players will keep whining about not having an "evil" option, they shoehorn one in and the end result is exactly the clumsy, "evil for evil's sake" type response which are so common in games. Imagine you have some sort of "threat to the whole world" type plot line going, but the main character decides to just fuck off and use the ensuing chaos to further their own power/glory/vanity/etc. While it could certainly make for an interesting experience for the player, it means the developers are basically making two games. It would require a large investment of time and resources into making something that isn't actually the game the developers set out to make. So, at minimum, the "evil" plot line needs to force the evil player to hit all the same story points, set pieces and the like which exist for the "heroic" plot. At best, it is going to feel forced and expose just how meaningless the player's choices are.
Ultimately, what players what in an "evil" plot in a game is an entirely different game. But, that's never actually going to happen; so, we get the half-assed versions we see today.
It's a mixed bag. Piped bot is just generally "meh" for me. With all the ad blocking I have turned on, I don't really see ads on Youtube and would rather give what little support my views provide to the creators on the platform. I also subscribe to Nebula to try and support them directly.
Many of the bots, especially the really noisy re-post type bots I tend to block. Sure, I want to see content on Lemmy, but a bot reposting everything from a site has a problem with just creating a lot of noise without any sort of filtering for interesting content. But, since I can block them selectively, I'd rather people had the room to create and I'll just remove the ones I don't like from my feed. Everyone wins.
Building a 3D printer is easy. Getting the details right to build a great 3D printer is hard, as this is where most companies fail. Why?
Because 3d printers are becoming cheap commodities. Those little details cost money and most manufacturers aren't willing to take the profit hit to do anything more than the bare minimum. It's only ever going to get worse at the lower end of the cost spectrum and while higher end printers may get somewhat cheaper, most people won't be able to afford that level of care. The majority of consumer level devices will continue to be just good enough to not get returned but always lacking in fit and finish.
It’s like republicans are actively trying to lose in November.
Um, did you stop reading at the second sentence?
The Debt Collective named Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), and Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) as particularly responsible for the language.
I don't have any love for the GOP, but this particular bit of "fuck you" is from neoliberal Democrats. They need replacing. Not with Republicans, but with better Democrats.
Pretty much this. I used to think that 50 was old. Now that I'm approaching it and know people past that age, I'm not sure I like that definition any more. I also don't "feel" old internally. Sure, my body isn't what it used to be. But, I am still active and haven't found myself limited in activities yet. Maybe that's coming. But, I'm also trying not to wreck the time I have left by being too stupid with my body. And I think that's where it's less about "being old" than it is being "used up". Sure, I did my share of stupid shit in my youth, we're all young and dumb at some point. With a bit of luck, we all get older. Hopefully, you take a few precautions and get lucky during that stupid stuff and you don't have a broken down body when you are older.
There is also a matter of experience and perspective. The more shit you live through, the more you are able to put life experiences in perspective. It's not only an age thing, being older usually means having lived through more things, but some folks get a lifetime of experience packed in a very short time due to bad circumstances. But, you start to recognize how little you can actually change or control in the world and start to accept the things you can't change. And maybe that's what "being old" is. You no longer have the vigor of youth nor the willingness to take on all the world's problems. You're more interested in just carving out a small patch of the world for yourself to live in as comfortably as you can. Sure, you may want a better world, and may even be roused to go do something about it from time to time. But you no longer believe that you can fix the world and really just want to warm your feet.